Cloudflare Workers vs Pages: which one to deploy on

Cloudflare points a new project at Workers with static assets. Pages still builds a static site from Git. The split is which features you need.

By David · Published October 31, 2026 · Updated November 3, 2026 · 13 min read

What changed: Workers static assets vs Pages

People also search workers vs pages cloudflare. It lives on the backend and stack hub. The reader is deciding where to deploy a site or an app on Cloudflare in 2026.

The Workers best practices page, last updated October 12, 2026, and checked October 31, 2026, says this:

Workers Static Assets is the recommended way to deploy static sites, single-page applications, and full-stack apps on Cloudflare. If you are starting a new project, use Workers instead of Pages. Pages continues to work, but new features and optimizations are focused on Workers.

The same section says a purely static site points assets.directory at the build output, and that no Worker script is needed.

The Pages getting started page, last updated August 21, 2026, opens with “Are you sure you want to use Pages?” It says Workers is Cloudflare’s primary platform for building applications, and it says to start new projects with Workers. Under that, it still offers three Pages setup methods: the C3 CLI, direct upload, and Git integration.

I searched the Pages index, the getting started page, and the limits page for a deprecation notice. None of those pages say Pages is deprecated. The Pages index, last updated August 25, 2026, still describes the product, and its limits link says 500 deploys a month on the Free plan.

Most third-party comparisons of this choice are from 2021. They predate Workers static assets. The current Cloudflare docs are the ones above, plus the migrate from Pages guide, last updated October 12, 2026. That guide is the workers static assets vs Pages comparison Cloudflare publishes. It includes the compatibility matrix used in the next section.

Cloudflare Workers vs Pages, feature by feature

Every row is from that matrix unless the cell says otherwise. The matrix page was last updated October 12, 2026. I read it on October 31, 2026. A checkmark on the matrix is “supported.” A yellow mark is “unsupported, workaround available.”

Gradual deployments are another row on the same matrix: supported on Workers, not on Pages.

D1 is on both columns. What a local SQLite file costs next to a local Postgres, on one machine, is SQLite vs Postgres. That timing is not a D1 bill.

Cloudflare Pages pricing and Workers pricing

Prices below are the vendor pages, checked October 31, 2026. Where a page gives no number, this section does not invent one. I did not open a Cloudflare invoice.

Static files are the part both products treat the same way. The Workers pricing page, last updated October 2, 2026, says requests to static assets are free and unlimited. The Pages Functions pricing page, last updated September 8, 2026, says the same for both free and paid plans, when the request does not invoke Functions.

Workers requests, from that Workers pricing page:

• Free: 100,000 requests a day, and 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation. No charge for duration.
• Paid: a $5 USD minimum a month for the account. 10 million requests included, then $0.30 per additional million. 30 million CPU milliseconds included, then $0.02 per additional million CPU milliseconds.

The Workers limits page, last updated October 29, 2026, lists the Free request cap as 100,000 a day and the Paid request row as no limit. The pricing page is the one that bills past 10 million. The limits page also lists 100 Workers on Free and 500 on Paid, and 5 cron triggers per account on Free.

A static asset request is not that Worker request. The static assets page says a URL that matches a file is served without invoking Worker code, when that is the default. The 10 millisecond CPU cap is for an invocation. This site’s config has no Worker script, so a matched file does not spend that cap. I did not measure a request against the quota.

Cloudflare Pages pricing, from the Pages limits page, last updated September 5, 2026:

• Free: 500 builds a month, 1 build at a time, a build timeout of 20 minutes.
• Pro: 5,000 builds a month, 5 concurrent builds.
• Business: 20,000 builds a month, 20 concurrent builds.
• Concurrent builds are counted per account.
• Free: 20,000 files. Paid plans: up to 100,000 files, after you set PAGES_WRANGLER_MAJOR_VERSION=4.
• One file: 25 MiB.
• Custom domains per project: 100 on Free, 250 on Pro, 500 on Business.
• Preview deployments: unlimited.
• Projects: 100 per account.

The Pages index calls the Free plan figure “500 deploys per month.” The limits table calls it “Builds per month.” I am using the table’s 500.

Workers pricing for Git is a different product. Workers Builds limits and pricing, last updated October 28, 2026:

• Free: 3,000 build minutes a month, 1 concurrent build, a 20 minute timeout.
• Paid: 6,000 build minutes a month, then $0.005 per minute, 6 concurrent builds, the same 20 minute timeout.
• Concurrent builds are the number that can run in parallel across an account.

Moving a Pages site onto Workers Builds does not keep the 500 build meter. It switches the meter to minutes. This post did not time a build, so it does not turn 3,000 minutes into a build count.

The sites on this account share the Pages plan’s 500 builds a month, so pushes are batched. That sharing is our record of the account, not a second number from the docs. The docs say the monthly build count depends on the plan, and that concurrent builds are counted per account. They do not print a sentence that says the 500 is shared. The plan limit is 500.

Pages Functions vs Workers

Cloudflare functions vs workers is this question. The product name is Pages Functions.

The Pages Functions page, last updated April 21, 2026, says Functions let you run code on the Cloudflare network with Cloudflare Workers. It says Workers runtime features are configurable on Pages Functions, including a subset of Node.js APIs and a compatibility date.

The pricing page then says requests to Functions are billed as Workers requests. On the Free plan, Functions requests and Workers requests draw on the same 100,000 a day. The page’s example is 50,000 of each. The cap resets at midnight UTC.

That is the sense in which Pages Functions are Workers. The runtime and the bill are Workers. The feature list is not. From the matrix in the section above: cron triggers, queue consumers, and Workers Logs are Workers, and they are not Pages. Durable Objects on Pages means a second Worker. File-based routing is the Pages shape. On Workers you write a script, use a framework, or compile the functions/ folder with wrangler pages functions build. The migrate guide says that compile command stays available, and it suggests a framework if you want to keep file-based routing. Hono is one framework with a Workers entry point. The same two JSON routes on Node, in Hono, Express, and Fastify, is a separate test. It was not deployed as a Worker. Choosing Bun or Node for a handler is Bun vs Node, measured on localhost. That run was not deployed either.

A full-stack app that needs those Workers-only rows should start on Workers. A static site that never invokes a Function does not pay the request quota for the HTML, on either product, per the pricing pages above.

The bundle size of an ORM is a different measurement. Drizzle vs Prisma timed one schema on this machine. That bundle was not deployed as a Worker.

How shipmunks.dev and ContextBolt run

shipmunks.dev is a static Astro site. On October 31, 2026 it moved from Cloudflare Pages deployed by a GitHub Actions direct-upload workflow to a Git-connected Cloudflare Pages project named shipmunks. That project builds on every push to main. Preview deployments are off. The direct-upload workflow is disabled. GitHub Actions minutes ran out the same day. Do not turn that workflow back on.

The Pages Free plan lists 500 builds a month. The sites on this account share that budget, so pushes to this repo are batched. A failed build is a fix and a new push, not an empty commit. The README in this repo is the record of that rule.

ContextBolt’s APIs run as Cloudflare Workers. The Worker names are contextbolt-seo, contextbolt-worker, and contextbolt-analytics. contextbolt.com itself is a Pages project. This post does not link to it. There is no article there that answers this question.

The database behind an API is a separate choice from the host that serves the HTML. Neon vs Supabase is the hosted Postgres bill. This post did not open either database.

I fetched https://shipmunks.dev/ twice on October 31, 2026. Both responses were HTTP 200, content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8, cache-control: public, max-age=3600, server: cloudflare, and cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC. The response date on both was Sat, 31 Oct 2026 16:13:35 GMT. The two cf-ray values ended in IAD. I did not see a HIT.

Moving a Pages site to Workers static assets

This site’s build output is dist. Astro writes a folder of index.html files, because trailingSlash is always, and it writes 404.html for unknown paths. The static site generation page, last updated August 25, 2026, is the matching config: not_found_handling of 404-page, and html_handling of auto-trailing-slash.

404-page serves the nearest 404.html with status 404 when the path is not a file. auto-trailing-slash is the default. The same page says a folder index.html is served with a trailing slash, and a bare foo.html is served without one. That is how this site already works.

There is no Worker script. Best practices says a purely static site does not need one.

The file is not at the root of this repo. The migrate guide says to put wrangler.jsonc in the project root, and a Pages project can already carry a Wrangler file there for pages_build_output_dir. A root file is what the Pages build would pick up. This copy lives only under public/templates/cloudflare-workers-static-assets/. The live Pages project does not read it.

Download wrangler.jsonc. The notes are in the README. Both are listed on Templates.

{
  "name": "shipmunks",
  "compatibility_date": "2026-10-31",
  "assets": {
    "directory": "./dist",
    "not_found_handling": "404-page",
    "html_handling": "auto-trailing-slash"
  }
}

name matches the Pages project. The migrate guide says the Worker name can be the same as the Pages project name. A real wrangler deploy would publish a Worker of that name. I did not run one.

Copy the file to a project root only when that project is ready to leave Pages. Then build, then run a dry run from that root. The command I ran is below. It used a copy of this file in a temp directory, with dist linked at the site that npm run build had just written. The config text is the one in the download.

After a real cutover, a new URL still has to be fetched. The order is how to get a new website indexed by Google. If Search Console says the sitemap could not be read, start with Sitemap could not be read.

What we tested

Checked October 31, 2026

npm run build wrote dist. I counted every file under dist with Python, summing os.path.getsize. There were 136 files and 47 directories. I did not use du, because a block size would change the total. Wrangler 4.156.0 printed “Read 183 files.” A debug log of the same command listed 183 paths, and those paths are the 136 files plus the 47 directories. The dry run was npx wrangler deploy --dry-run from /tmp/shipmunks-assets-dry-run, with this wrangler.jsonc and a symlink named dist pointing at the built site. CI was set so the CLI would not open a login prompt. No Cloudflare token was set. Nothing was deployed.

dist and the dry run, October 31, 2026

Measurement	Result
Wrangler	4.156.0
Files in dist	136
Directories in dist	47
Paths in the “Read 183 files” line	183, the 136 files plus the 47 directories
Sum of file sizes	5,691,411 bytes
Largest file	blog/drizzle-vs-prisma/index.html, 128,803 bytes
Per-file limit	25 MiB, which is 26,214,400 bytes, on Workers Free, Workers Paid, and Pages
Not uploaded as files	_headers is 1,993 bytes and _redirects is 918 bytes. Wrangler printed Ignoring asset for each.
Total Upload	0.35 KiB / gzip 0.25 KiB. That line is the Worker script. This config has no main script. It is not the size of the asset files.

• 136

  Files in dist

• 5,691,411

  Sum of file sizes, bytes

• 128,803

  Largest file, bytes

 ⛅️ wrangler 4.156.0
────────────────────
✨ Read 183 files from the assets directory /tmp/shipmunks-assets-dry-run/dist
Total Upload: 0.35 KiB / gzip: 0.25 KiB
No bindings found.
--dry-run: exiting now.

Which one to pick